Economist Milton Friedman predicted in Newsweek nearly 34 years ago that Richard Nixon's ambitious "global war against drugs" would be a failure. Much evidence today suggests that he was right. But the war rages on with little mainstream challenge of its basic weapon, prohibition. To be sure, Mr. Friedman wasn't the only critic. William Buckley's National Review declared a decade ago that the U.S. had "lost" the drug war, bolstering its case with testimony from the likes of Joseph D. McNamara, a former police chief in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif. But today discussion of the war's depressing cost-benefit ratio is being mainly conducted in the blogosphere, where the tone is predominantly libertarian. In the broader polity, support for the great Nixon crusade remains sufficiently strong to discourage effective counterattacks. [continues 920 words]
A Brussels court seven days ago sentenced a Tunisian-born al Qaeda terrorist to 10 years in jail for plotting a suicide attack on a NATO air base. Eighteen other terrorists were sentenced for other crimes, including passport forgeries linked to the murder by two suicide bombers of anti-Taliban Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud in September 2001. It was a good day for a country not well known for supporting U.S. anti-terror efforts. But Belgium's bad image in America has been earned mainly by its noisy socialist politicians. Belgian law enforcement officers, like their counterparts in many other countries of the world, are mainly serious people who are cooperating with the U.S.-led effort by searching out and jailing would-be attackers. [continues 941 words]
